A year-long Emerson Collective Fellowship will help create a documentary that tells the story of the impact of Every Campus A Refuge on refugees.
“The goal is to create a truly for us, by us, about us record of refugee resettlement at colleges and universities across the country. We want to center those experiences and accelerate the establishment of ECAR Chapters that are informed and driven by those experiences.”
Diya Abdo, Lincoln Financial Professor of English, received an Emerson Collective Fellowship designed to advance education, immigration, the environment, social justice, media and health.
Diya founded Every Campus A Refuge (ECAR), which advocates for housing refugee families on college and university campus grounds and supporting them in their resettlement. She will spend the year working on a creative oral history of Every Campus A Refuge.
This oral history Sawt (which means voice in Arabic) will center the voices of those with lived experience of being hosted by ECAR resettlement campuses. Even the interviewers will be former refugees supported by ECAR campuses.
“The goal is to create a truly for us, by us, about us record of refugee resettlement at colleges and universities across the country,” says Diya. “We want to center those experiences and accelerate the establishment of ECAR Chapters that are informed and driven by those experiences.”
Christian Matheis, Visiting Professor for Justice and Policy Studies, will help build the data collection component of the project by researching and finding ECAR participants and on the front end and helping with the creative process on the back end.
There are 28 ECAR chapters and resettlement campuses in 19 states. More than two dozen more campuses are interested in taking part.
“I am pretty overwhelmed, honored and surprised to be honest,” says Diya, who never even applied for the fellowship. Instead, Emerson officials contacted her last summer and told her if she was interested she should apply. “They researched me – that was pretty cool,” she says.
Diya says she's grateful for the help Christian and Rachl Riskind, Guilford's Christina B. Gidynski '54 Associate Professor of Psychology, offered in the application process.
The fellowship is the latest accolade for Diya and her work with ECAR. She is the recipient of the J.M. Kaplan Fund’s Innovation Prize (2021), Campus Compact’s Thomas Ehrlich Civically Engaged Faculty Award (2019), Gulf South Summit’s Outstanding Service-Learning Collaboration in Higher Education Award (2017) and The Washington Center’s Civic Engagement in Higher Education Award (2017).
Diya has been making presentations about ECAR far and wide, including at the White House and the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Dr. Abdo sits on the Advisory Board of the Community Sponsorship Hub.
Founded by Laurene Powell Jobs in 2011, Emerson Collective has consistently focused its efforts on key societal challenges including education, immigration, environmental sustainability and health equity. The collective aims to foster hope and bring about transformative change through strategic support of individuals and projects with the potential to make a real difference.
The fellowship program, with its flexible funding model, empowers fellows to pursue their visions without the constraint of detailed financial reporting, encouraging innovation and risk-taking.
Diya says the fellowship allows participants in her cohort “to work on projects that strengthen our world, and gives us a great deal of support, freedom, and trust in our visions.”